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qemu-img
Invocationusage: qemu-img command [command options]
The following commands are supported:
Command parameters:
raw
qemu-img info
to know the real size used by the
image or ls -ls
on Unix/Linux.
qcow2
qcow
cow
vmdk
cloop
M
(megabyte) and G
(gigabyte) are supported
Command description:
If base_image is specified, then the image will record only the
differences from base_image. No size needs to be specified in
this case. base_image will never be modified unless you use the
commit
monitor command.
-e
option) or compressed (-c
option).
Only the format qcow
supports encryption or compression. The
compression is read-only. It means that if a compressed sector is
rewritten, then it is rewritten as uncompressed data.
Encryption uses the AES format which is very secure (128 bit keys). Use a long password (16 characters) to get maximum protection.
Image conversion is also useful to get smaller image when using a
growable format such as qcow
or cow
: the empty sectors
are detected and suppressed from the destination image.